It’s been a busy week. Kourtney Kardashian—holding a large sign at a gig—is with child. We have mere days until And Just Like That Season 2, and softboi Aidan’s comeback, torments our screens. But even as covetable Pharrell-designed Louis Vuitton garments paraded the catwalk yesterday, my mind couldn’t stop refocusing on a specific spot in the North Atlantic and an ongoing search for a missing vessel.
I’m sure you’re caught up on the Titanic submersible developments, the news notifications bothering your screen as you, erm, dive into the distressing facts and forecasts. On Sunday, five deep-sea tourists boarded the Titan, a carbon-fiber and titanium craft, in order to visit history’s most renowned shipwreck, the R.M.S. Titanic. The sub lost radio contact and radar tracking two hours into its nearly 13,000-foot descent to the ocean floor. Nothing has been heard since, though a Canadian plane recently reported underwater noise at 30-minute intervals in the search area. At last—rather disturbing—count, the Titan has 40 hours of breathable air left.
The story has a chokehold on the global consciousness. We simply cannot shake the mental imagery of these men, miles under the surface, huddled together in the closest of quarters, with a limited air supply, a single porthole, and a petrol can to pee into. I’m struggling to move beyond the literal, visceral horror of five people suffocating to death in a pod at the bottom of the ocean. It is a genuine, real-time, horror story.
Theirs is, at this point, quite a well-known square of Atlantic, notoriously iceberg-y. In 1912, Jack Dawson debatably had room on a floating door, and in 1997 Rose DeWitt Bukater dropped her necklace in the same spot. Thanks to James Cameron, we are all Titaniacs in some way or another, captivated by that ill-fated maiden voyage. The Titanic’s easily thwarted unsinkable-ness is a cautionary tale of mankind’s belief in science dominating nature, of arrogance. After we fucked around and found out a century ago, it still seems inherently unwise to board a large metal Tic Tac, especially having signed a waiver that mentions death three times on the first page.
The exercise feels moneyed and indulgent and, above all, unnecessary. It’s quite a Succession sort of trip, actually; a deep-sea splurge for the superrich (these expeditions cost up to $250,000 per person), the sub’s disappearance joked about online as some sort of luxury comeuppance. It would be a little farfetched to think of Titanic-adjacent voyages as universally jinxed, and yet that’s part of the reason we’re incapable of looking away.
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